Life in the Street, or Why Historians Should Read the Poets

Abstract

Abstract:In order to counter modern historians' abstract conception of the populus Romanus, in this lecture I present some texts from the poets, from Lucilius to Juvenal, as illustrations of life in the streets of Rome, with some help from material remains in Pompeii and Herculaneum and the evidence, long neglected, of the urban 'gazette' known as acta populi. Ciceronian texts are also employed, to disprove the persistent but erroneous belief that the populus took no part in republican political life.