The Remarkable Life, Death, and Afterlife of an Ordinary Roman
A Social History

Explores Roman life and death as told through one remarkable individual's funerary monument.

Jeremy Hartnett (Author)

9781009536066, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 January 2025

204 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.6 cm, 0.46 kg

'While this is a relatively short book, Hartnett has included a great deal of information in its pages. Indeed, it is impressive just how much Hartnett can parse from a funerary monument …. Readers … will be well rewarded by this insightful biography about ordinary Romans.' Owain Williams, Ancient History

When we think of Romans, Julius Caesar or Constantine might spring to mind. But what was life like for everyday folk, those who gazed up at the palace rather than looking out from within its walls? In this book, Jeremy Hartnett offers a detailed view of an average Roman, an individual named Flavius Agricola. Though Flavius was only a generation or two removed from slavery, his successful life emerges from his careful commemoration in death: a poetic epitaph and life-sized marble portrait showing him reclining at table. This ensemble not only enables Hartnett to reconstruct Flavius' biography, as well as his wife's, but also permits a nuanced exploration of many aspects of Roman life, such as dining, sex, worship of foreign deities, gender, bodily display, cultural literacy, religious experience, blended families, and visiting the dead at their tombs. Teasing provocative questions from this ensemble, Hartnett also recounts the monument's scandalous discovery and extraordinary afterlife over the centuries. 

Introduction
Part I. The Life and Death of Flavius Agricola: 1. The Monument, The Epitaph, and Their Setting
2. The Person, A Life, and Its Presentation
3. Flavia Primitiva: Wife, Mother, Casta Cultrix
4. Flavia Primitiva, Experience, and Community
5. To Eat is to Be? Flavius' Worldview in Perspective
6. Meeting Flavius at the Tomb
Part II. The Many Afterlives of Flavius Agricola: 7. Flavius Agricola in Early Modern Rome
8. Flavius in the Modern World
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA]