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Over the last twenty years or so the lives of ordinary people in the ancient world have received much needed attention. Sarah Bond’s treatment of underappreciated artisan and merchant elements brings into sharp focus the disparity between what elites thought and wrote about them, and the lives they themselves lived. In the process, Bond does an fine job of tracing changing elite approaches and their repercussions for their despised fellow citizens. In carrying her analysis through into Late Antiquity, she offers a significant advance in our understanding of attitudes and reality throughout antiquity.
The goal of the book is two fold. First, to see how prejudices against certain occupations were constructed and then to examine how these prejudices shifted and even dissolved as religious, governmental, and economic factors caused change in thought and actions. The idea of pollution is examined-something Bond defines as “out of place within a given system.” The “out of place” is labeled for all to see by “taboo”-the public recognition that an act is in some way “out of place.” Bond examines the professions of public criers, tanners, and mint workers to explain how each found itself “out of place” and so “taboo” in Roman society.
The investigation is made more difficult and more intriguing because the evidence used is widespread in type, time, and geography. Anyone familiar with recent work on ordinary people in the Roman world will not be surprised by the inscriptions and obscure bits of literature used. Still, Bond wisely and prominently reminds us that elite literary sources in general exist in a world of prejudice and bias and create a world of social perceptions that usually only applies to the elites themselves, thus rendering their writing’s use to examine social prejudices among ordinary people difficult if not dangerous. In particular, Bond points out convincingly that the stigma and taboo related to tanners is largely a construct of the elite imagination.
An important contribution is the emphasis on marginalized people living their daily lives. Far from walking around feeling stigmatized, marginalized, depressed and unappreciated, criers, mint workers, tanners, and others organized their lives to be successful and happy by banding together, forming associations, and creating networks for social and economic gain. An important lesson taught here is...