Christopher Hart
Plebs on Parade
Invisible Romans: Prostitutes, Outlaws, Slaves, Gladiators and Others
By Robert C Knapp
Profile Books 312pp £25 order from our bookshop
A Roman in Africa once made a curse, calling on the daemon to ‘torture and kill the horses of the Green and the White teams, kill and smash the charioteers Clarus, Felix, Primulus, Romanus’, and ‘not leave a breath in them’. Fragments of these curse tablets have been found all over the Roman world, and they can tell us a great deal about who could write, how people felt about sport, and how they saw the world.
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