About the book: 2017 / Major American historian Robert Knapp, who taught for more than 30 years at the University of California at Berkeley, the history and culture of Ancient Rome, makes the heroes of his study of ordinary, “inconspicuous” inhabitants of the Roman Empire: workers, housewives, beggars, slaves, soldiers, gladiators, robbers, prostitutes, those about whose lives much less is known, in difference from emperors, philosophers, senators, that is, prominent representatives of the state. The author covers the period of Roman history from Emperor Octavian Augustus to Emperor Constantine the Great, creating a clearer and more complete picture of the daily life of the lower classes of the empire, its negative aspects.