Jérôme Carcopino
It’s an unsettling experience to read this book.
This is the classic study of daily life in Rome at its zenith: around 100AD – 140AD. Published in 1941AD, it relies both on Latin sources and archaeology.
The book really makes the city come alive, with descriptions of the towering but flimsy apartment blocks and streets, the traders stalls, water bearers, cart traffic all night, and all the different occupations and social strata. A second section follows some typical citizens’ activities through the day’s routine.
Carcopino must have read almost every text that survives from that era. He constantly throws out little observations from poems or speeches of the day that reflect on daily life. As it turns out, archaeology is of only limited use in getting a grasp of those times: there is little trace left of the layout of the little streets, no trace of the six storey apartment blocks that filled up the city.
Read on …
The image of ancient Roman world as decadent is a paradigm which haunts our western civilisation. Although the society depicted in this book is gone 1900 years from the face of the earth, the
It is impossible to look at the Roman world in the same manner as one might look at Viking society, or at the Incas. The modern person will maybe disapprove of the Viking adulation of violence, or human sacrifice, etc. But nobody feels a sense of outrage at their moral failings.
But with the Romans an extra level of disgust comes into play. They were steeped in hypocrisy. They are too close (yet far in time) to coolly regard as objects of study. The social progress, sophisticated laws to protect the weak, changes in the status of women, broadening out of rights – all these beg to be seen as progress, as a reaching out towards the enlightened state of our present society.
And there’s the rub. Looking at the Roman world forces us to think of whether progress and enlightment exist at all. And do we all share the same notion of what constitutes progress?
Carcopino records the increasing tendency of Roman marriages at the turn of the first century to be childless. Women “quit their embroidery, their reading, their song, and their lyre, to put their enthusiasm into an attempt to rival men”. The women sought to rival their husbands in sport, debating, feasting and drinking. Adultery became more prevalent, divorce more easily available. Carcopino mentions all this with disaproval, conflating these developments with others which the current generation would more quickly condemn – unrestrained feasting until the revellers vomitted, famous men divorcing their wives as soon as they show a wrinkle.
Carcopino seems tuned to perceive decadance and the beginning of decline almost everywhere. And there are some developments in ancient society which he notes but which
now – 80 years after he wrote them – will resonate differently with the reader. “Speculation was the life-blood of an economic system where production was losing ground day by day and mercantalism was invading everything. Work might still earn a modest living, but no longer yielded such fortunes as the chance of imperial favour or a speculative gamble might bestow. Middlemen and entertainers … raked in millions.”
The book is available here:
http://archive.org/details/dailylifeinancie035465mbp
Valancourt The Viaduct reissue
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Irish Times Q+A