Making the Invisible Visible: Ancient Economy and Ordinary Lives in Ancient Greece and Rome

The history of every day life in Ancient Greece and Rome has relied on artifacts and documents that have survived into the modern era. Cicero, for instance, was a prolific writer of texts and letters.  We have many of his letters and texts today because they were copied and shared and disseminated. These letters provide Cicero's personal glimpse of Roman politics and culture, and the social unrest taking place during his lifetime. A small subset of the ancient Greek and Roman populations were literate. Any knowledge that we have is filtered through the experiences of the elite. They may have been sympathetic to the working classes and the enslaved populations or they may have been oblivious to the details of the lives of populations at large. Either way, their reports do not provide us with the actual lived experiences, concerns, ambitions, and struggles of the peasant farmer, the enslaved, or the working classes. How did the non-elite live, how were they affected by the frequent wars and changes in government and politics? Scholars are working on filling these gaps in knowledge. To do this, archaeologists are exploring new locations and applying new approaches to interpreting archaeological finds and working with new kinds of evidence. This effort to uncover the history of those outside the elite classes is exemplified by the first systematic archaeological study of the Roman peasant,The Roman Peasant Project: Excavating the Roman Rural Poor (2020).

In the study of the ancient economy, scholars are rethinking the ways in which to analyze and quantify the economies of the Greco-Roman world. The 2009, Quantifying the Roman Economy: Methods and Problems, brings together multiple scholars to provide a diverse view of emerging methods, perspectives and views. To represent varying views and approaches represented in current scholarship, essays are followed by a "response to" or a "comment on," illustrating the new and developing nature of this field. Other seminal works in this field are The Ancient Economy and Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World.

The Penn Libraries is purchasing widely and in multiple languages in these two growing areas of research. These new approaches of interpretation and analysis provide us with the prospect of a widened and enriched view of history.