Product Description

In this portrait of life in Ancient Rome, the author begins by painting a backcloth on which the social, political, cultural and religious aspects of the community are drawn. He enlarges on the details of everyday life, following the typical routine of a normal day from dawn to dinner and the talk that continued long into the night. This study, which includes a bibliography and notes by Professor Rowell, describes the houses and multi-storeyed apartments of the city of over a million inhabitants, the social classes from senators to slaves and the Roman family and the position of women.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #194444 in Books
• Published on: 1991-06-27
• Original language: Italian
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

About the Author
Jerome Carcopino was born in Verneuil-sur-Avre, France, in 1881. He was a lecturer at the University of Algiers in Algeria before his career was interrupted by World War I. Lecturing at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1920 to 1937, he later became the Director of the French School in Rome. From 1941 to 1942, he was the Minister of National Education and Youth in Vichy France. He died in 1970.

Customer Reviews

An engaging account of life at the peak of the Roman Empire.
Now more than 50 years old, this account of daily life in ancient Rome still manages to completely absorb the reader.

Carcopino has managed to avoid the trap of becoming overawed by his subject material. Showing clarity and even a love of his subject, he delves into the ordinary routines, habits and desires of the inhabitants of ancient Rome at it's peak. What was it like for a Roman to shave?!

This is a 'smells and sounds' book. Other publications may provide a more chronolgical/historical perspective on Rome notably Gibbons 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' but only Carcopino will leave you feeling closer to those men and women who lived under the rule of Caesers from Augustus [27 B.C - 14 A.D] to Trajan [98-117 A.D].

My own specific interest was in discovering how early Christianity made an impact on Roman life. I won't spoil the effect of Carcopino's closing line under the sub-heading 'The Advent of Christianity' but for a reader with faith it will never be forgotten.

I recommend this book more for those who want to understand 'what it was like' rather than simply 'what happened and when'.

Great book, needs illustrations
I loved this book. Even though there's a fair bit of detail on Roman dining, clothing, entertainment and so on, the text never becomes boring. Even what I consider the driest part of the book, a section on Roman clocks and timekeeping, manages to be breezy enough.

The book however, is badly in need of some illustrations. The author has done his best to describe things, and done quite well, but I DID find it a bit of a drag trying to visualize things such as buildings and clothing.

Even a few simple line drawings would have gone a very long way.

The glory, the gore and the grind of daily life, vividly presented
You might want to turn directly to the last chapter in which the gluttony and debauchery of Imperial Rome is most clearly spelled out. Then again you might want to wait for that as one does for a dessert. Then again I shouldn't be such a smart aleck.

Jerome Carcopino who had this published in France in 1939 is a Latin and Greek scholar from the old school, from the days when Latin was required in our public schools and any educated person had at least a smattering of the dry stuff. This book presumes some Latin and some knowledge of Roman history. Additionally the Latin is not always translated into English--I presume it is the same in Carcopino's original French. And he refers to personages in Roman history without giving dates or even a sense of temporal order such as an American author might refer to Emerson or the Nixon administration and feel comfortable knowing that his readers would be able to form an approximate time frame. Furthermore, there is a pedant's feel to much of the book with Carcopino giving us again and again the exact Latin terminology in italics following the English expression. Readers interested in learning or brushing up on their Latin will find this most agreeable, and readers like me, who have little Latin and less Greek, will enjoy recognizing the Latin originals in their ancient usage that have given us English cognates. Thus "frigidarium" refers to the cold part of the Roman bath, and a "paedagogus" was a slave who served as a tutor.

Sometimes Carcopino (and I must say his able English translator, E. O. Lorimer) gives us the English translation following the Latin, and often it is a famous Latin phrase that will delight the eyes of the learned. For example on page 336 we find this observation explaining the use of a certain room near the feasting room: "vomunt ut edant, edunt ut vomant (they vomit in order to eat, and eat in order to vomit)."

I found it interesting to notice Carcopino's views on certain subjects and how they differ from today. For example he writes that the Roman players fought for a ball "blown full of air...as in basketball, but with more elegance." (p.320) I doubt that such a line would be written today considering how graceful and elegant basketball has become since those early days of the sport from which Carcopino writes, circa 1939. I also note that as Carcopino was banging the typewriter keys the storm clouds of impending war were once again gatheringover Europe. I kept looking for some indication as to where our author stood vis-à-vis the rise of the Storm Trooper mentality in Germany and elsewhere, but he remained true to the historian's credo of not judging current events.

Interesting too are the occasional references to the modern world as colored by Carcopino's zeitgeist. For example he sometimes compared Roman habits to those of Europeans, Americans and even Arabs. Thus he writes "As among the Arabs still, belching was considered a politeness, justified by philosophers who thought the highest wisdom was to follow the dictates of nature. Pushing this doctrine even further, Claudius had considered an edict authorizing other emissions of wind from which even Arabs refrain..." (p. 335)

My take on the daily life after reading this volume is I would prefer to have lived in the pre-history rather than in Rome during the days of the emperors and I am very glad I live today and not then! As cases in point consider that the wine the Romans drank was blended with resin and pine pitch and drunk diluted with water. (pp. 332-333) Furthermore the glorious baths of Rome were communal without chlorine or the like, while the public bathrooms featured a kind of latrine with holes in the top that citizens could sit on and defecate while talking to their neighbor a few inches away. And the narrow, unpaved streets were filled with refuse of all kinds including the nightly contents of chamber pots.

The book is divided into two parts, "The Physical and Moral Background of Roman Life," and "The Day's Routine." Carcopino goes to great scholarly lengths to get his numbers right on the size and extent of the city and on the likely number of inhabitants, including breakdowns on citizens, freedmen and slaves. He calculates the relative fortunes of the various levels of society and informs us on religion, education, the status of women, arts and leisure and many other aspects of Roman life. From the title we can expect that the political and warfare of the emperors will be glossed over, and in this we are not disappointed. In fact the great success of this volume, which has been in print since it was first published almost seven decades ago, attests to the lively interest that readers have in life apart from what is usually presented.

I should mention that I have the volume from The Folio Society published in 2004. It is beautifully rendered with a number of color plates, a fine introduction by Keith Hopkins and includes an up-to-date (as of 2004) bibliography for further reading. There are several footnotes per page citing such illustrious authors as Pliny, Martial, Petronius, Tacitus, Juvenal etc. By the way, Carcopino's book is not to be confused with a book with the same title written by Florence Dupont which I haven't read.