Daily Life in Late Antiquity by Kristina Sessa (review)

Despite a flurry of scholarly interest in Late Antiquity in recent decades, until now no general study has systematically surveyed daily life throughout the Mediterranean world in this period. Kristina Sessa's engaging new study admirably fills that gap. Focusing specifically on ca. 250–600 ce, Sessa writes for students and general readers, and her text assumes no prior knowledge of ancient history. The book does not so much advance an argument as describe a layered and complex social world, at once strange and familiar, characterized by both dynamism and decay, which is of interest not just for its connections with the classical past or the medieval future, but in its own right.

In this world, daily life moved primarily to the rhythms of the countryside, where most people lived. Across a territory as vast and varied as that of the later Roman empire, there was considerable diversity in the local organization of communities and the social networks that bound them together, but peasant cultivators everywhere focused on raising staples such as wheat, olives, grapes, and pigs (Chapter 1). The empire's cities shrank in size, re-agglomerated around new sites of wealth and activity, saw the abandonment or repurposing of classical buildings, and struggled to greater or lesser degrees with warfare and urban violence. Yet they also continued to be centers of officialdom, hubs of economic activity, and the humming focus of public spectacle, bathing culture, prostitution, and religious cult (Chapter 2). Social and economic life everywhere centered on the household, understood at the time both as a physical space—the house, its properties, and furnishings—and as the community of relatives, slaves, clients, tenants, and even seasonal workers who inhabited that space, and whose daily concerns included cooking, eating, sleeping, human waste management, leisure, and domestic work (Chapter 3). Unlike in some pre-modern empires, the late Roman state was not distant and remote. It intruded into ordinary people's lives in a multiplicity of ways, benefitting and burdening them through the adjudication of disputes, the registration and taxation of property, the billeting of soldiers, and the provisioning of fodder for stations on the public post (Chapter 4). In Late Antiquity, as today, people's embodied experiences varied enormously with gender, wealth, status, and much else. Thus, for example, free men enjoyed much greater sexual license than did women, and they also had greater access to higher education. Disease disproportionately affected urban dwellers, because cities were cesspools of infection. The basic item of clothing for men and women, free and enslaved, rich and poor alike was the tunic, but with telling variations in quantity, quality, and accessories (Chapter 5). For "pagans," Jews, Christians, and Manicheans alike, religious rituals of various sorts were a part of daily life. Though monumental architecture could play an important role in communal religious life, everyday ritual practice continued to unfold primarily within the household, as it had in the Mediterranean for centuries. Lived religion also extended to practices of ascetic self-discipline, astrology, the casting of spells and curses, and the cultivation of relationships with the special dead (Chapter 6).

Sessa's study succeeds at engaging students from a range of educational backgrounds and aptitudes. Each chapter begins with a profile of an individual, which serves both to draw readers in and to illuminate larger trends in late ancient society. Sessa has chosen these masterfully. Thus, for example, when Valeria Verecundia died in Rome at the age of thirty-four, her husband and daughter commemorated her in an epitaph as the best physician in the neighborhood. Her story introduces the discussion of body and mind. The role of the state is explored through the figure of Fl. Abinnaeus, who served in the army for thirty-three years before retiring and becoming a garrison commander in fourth-century Egypt. There, his daily concerns included provisioning his troops, handling personnel decisions, helping discharged veterans with their personal affairs, providing muscle to local tax collectors, and (together...