In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviews Private Life: From Rome to Byzantium WALTER GOFFART Paul Veyne, editor; Arthur Goldhammer, translator. A History of Private Life, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, general editors. A History of Private Life, volume 1 Cambridge, Mass, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1987. 688, illus. us $29.50 'Our project was fraught with peril. The ground we hoped to explore was untouched. No one had sifted through or even identified useful source material' The brave words of Georges Duby (as surviving general editor) complement the publisher's promise of a 'milestone in historical research' and a 'heretofore secret tale.' Yet Edward Gibbon owned an Histoire de la vie privee des Fran~ais (1782), and the University of Toronto Library houses a four-volume Vie privee des anciens (1865), together with several hundred more books answering to the titles of 'private,' 'daily,' or 'everyday' life. This project, Duby admits, was instigated by a resourceful publisher. Ordinary life sells books now as it has since the eighteenth century; and it holds even more promise in the current market if touched, as here, by the wand of 'the Annales school.' In keeping with a vast subject, the program of this first volume is severely limited. Paul Veyne is concerned with Rome between about 100 BC and AD 200. On a smaller scale, Peter Brown (the sole non-French contributor) carries forward through late Antiquity. A special, archaeological section, by Yvon Thebert, concerns 'Private Life and Domestic Architecture in Roman Africa.' Chronological coverage resumes with Michel Rouche on 'The Early Middle Ages in the West' and Evelyne Patlagean, more narrowly, on 'Byzantium in the Tenth and Eleventh Century.' Veyne and Brown give the volume its value; the other three, for different reasons, offer them no competition. Thebert on Roman houses, though advertised as a 'part of our work [that] breaks new ground,' overindulges in learned disputes and presents 'how the domus worked' as the embodiment of architecture , rather than as a place to live. Private life intrudes as obscenity: 'The sexual connotations of the bedroom were as obvious in Roman times as in other periods. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1989 410 WALTER GOFFART It was here that the prevailing morality was most shockingly transgressed - a place of adultery, incest, and unnatural intercourse.' Two-holed private latrines also move the archaeologist to social history: 'like public latrines, they could be used by more than one person at a time. But the group of persons admitted was now quite limited.' Between pedantry and smut, the breaking of new ground remains an unfulfilled promise. Patlagean avoids infelicities but lacks material. The indistinctness of the line between private and public leaves Veyne and Brown unworried; Patlagean, however, by scrupulously clinging to the private sphere, turns up few documents . Stilt what she tells us is honest and straightforward. One of Rouche's many 'deductions' exemplifies his rhetoric: the penitential manuals penalize masturbation; e.G. Junghas shown that arsonists are invariably masturbators; therefore, possibly, arson was the real target ofthe penitentials. Such reasoning fosters great liberties. Rouche, though exclaiming, 'This is no Romantic image,' wishes us to behold Barbarity marginalizing Civilization. Here, Romans possess many virtues that Veyne denies them earlier in the volume. Counterpointed to their gentility are the Germanic Franks. They lived in 'great, hangarlike wooden houses, where uncles and aunts, male and female cousins, children, slaves, and servants all slept together, naked, around a common fire'; their 'penchant for marrying kin' is even detectable in their skeletons; their women showed, by appeals to saints for fertility, that procreation was 'close to being an obsession.' In deformations like these, a style that professional historians forsook towards 1850 is reborn. Veyne and Brown interpret the 'private life' of the title quite freely. Brown's pages, half Rouche's total, explain how marital morality was affected by the massive public change that started with 'civic man' in second-century Roman municipalities and ended with the 'good Christian' member ofa new community, the Cat~olic Church. A traditional civil elite had once strengthened its social pre-eminence by decorous marriage, but by the fifth century social leadership had passed...

pdf

Share