Review: Daily Life in Ancient Rome. The People and the City at the Height of the Empire

In previous decades, PIW published books in the “Daily Life” series. It is with considerable regret that I used the past tense in the previous sentence, because the books published in this series are often of a high substantive level, despite their assumed popular science nature. One of such books is the work by Mr. Jerome Carcopino entitled “Daily Life in Ancient Rome. The People and the City at the Height of the Empire”.

While reading this well-written book, you can visualize a real picture of ancient Rome in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE with little intellectual effort. In the face of this realistic and full-of-life vision, no other visions of the ancient world that popular film productions serve us stand a chance, because they are characterized by condemnable simplifications and substantive mistakes that falsify the image of the presented world. I recommend this book to all who want to break free from these fashionable and widely known distortions about the living conditions of our ancient predecessors.