Xenofobía y racismo en el Mundo Antiguo (Barcelona: Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2019, 266 pages, 30 euros) edited by Francisco Marco Símon, Francisco Pina Polo, and José Remesal Rodríguez, addresses questions about xenophobia and racism in Antiquity. While recognizing that these are not old concepts, through the analysis of historical and philosophical texts, discourses, and epigraphy, the authors argue that it is possible to find xenophobic and racist practices in these sources, both in the construction of alterity and in the practices to which this alterity was submitted. Factors such as language, ethnicity and religion are mobilized to justify the domination and ridicule of certain populations within the Roman Empire, even by other groups under Roman domination. Finally, the book addresses how contemporary discourses use ancient ideas to justify current racist and xenophobic practices.

In Women and Society in the Roman World: A Sourcebook of Inscriptions from the Roman West (Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 345 pag, $130), Emily Hemelrijk presents a catalog of inscriptions from the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD, to investigate what these inscriptions can tell us about women in antiquity. The book is organized into seven thematic chapters, covering topics such as social and family relationships, occupations, religious positions, public affairs, geographic mobility and civic recognition. The author's approach does not focus on a specific social class, but transits between different groups of women, from domestic slaves to empresses, to argue how epigraphy allows accessing interests, social roles, construction of values and how these women chose to be described and remembered.

In Political Conversations in Late Republican Rome (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022, 304 pages, hardcover, $100), Cristina Rosillo-López explores the importance of political conversations outside the institutional settings of the Roman Republic. Despite working mostly with sources produced by Cicero and other members of the elites, the author emphasizes the importance of “extra-institutional politics” and the ways in which information and opinions are obtained and discussed outside the official environments of politics, emphasizing how agreements and disagreements depend on social conditions in order to be expressed. She also discusses how people outside the senatorial elites, such as freedmen, enter and circulate in the senatorial circles to advocate for their own interests. At the end of the book, the author has included an appendix with all the mentions of non-senatorial actors mentioned in the sources worked on.

In Class and Power in Roman Palestine. The Socioeconomic Setting of Judaism and Christian Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. p. 353, $29.99), Anthony Keddie investigates the forms of socio-economic organization in the early Roman domination of Palestine (63 BC-70 AD). Using literary documentation (New Testament and Flavius Josephus), material (tableware, lamps, clothing, mortuary practices), and comparative analyzes with other provinces, Keddie analyzes the changes that have taken place in fields such as urban development, land ownership and organization of the work, taxes, religious economy, and materiality. Thus, he finds that despite small improvements in the living conditions of non-elites, the economic integration into the Empire deepened the inequalities in relation to the elites. By reintroducing issues of class, social distinctions and the agency of non-elites, Keddie points to a reading of the analyzed texts as material contributions to an ideological class shift in the face of inequalities in Roman Palestine.

Women's lives, women's voices: Roman material culture and female agency in the Bay of Naples (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2021, 360 pages, US$55) is a collection of studies, edited by Brenda Longfellow and Molly Swetnam-Burland, about the experiences of women from different social groups in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Divided into three thematic sections, the book addresses women’s constructions of public and commercial identities, the ways in which they self-identified and how they were identified by others and, finally, how to understand their experiences through the idealized representations with which they were qualified. With extensive use of material documentation, from the built spaces to graffiti, the authors seek to overcome interpretations that gave women only experiences and expectations as wives and mothers. Therefore, they emphasize the ways in which women act in the relationships they maintain in broader social contexts, carried out through their actions in the family, at work and in religious practices.

In Potters at Work in Ancient Corinth: Industry, Religion, and the Penteskouphia Pinakes (ASCSA, Athens and Princeton, 2022, 448 pages, paperback, $75), Eleni Hasaki analyzes nearly 100 pinakes, decorated clay plaques, which represent scenes of work in potteries, coming from a site in the southwest of Corinth. The author discusses general aspects of the archaeological site and the pinakes, and then discusses what she calls “almost like a visual blog” of the potters’ daily lives: iconography, technology, organization of work and workers, and their religion. For the author, these representations are crucial to understanding the craft and technology of Greek pottery, also illuminating broader aspects of artisan communities in ancient Greece. The book also includes a catalog with the analyzed pinakes.

Cultural History of Work in Antiquity (London: Bloomsbury, 2020, 232 pages, £25.99) is the volume dedicated to Antiquity (mostly the Greek-Roman world, between 500 BCE - 450 CE) of Bloomsbury’s six volume series on the Cultural History of Work, which seeks to rethink work beyond the economy. Edited by Ephraim Lytle, the volume follows the organization of the collection, with chapters about the imagery representations of workers, places and forms of cultural organization of the workspace, skills and technologies used in work practice, and the relationship between work and mobility, society, political culture and leisure. The chapters demonstrate, as a whole, an effort to overcome modern theoretical assumptions about ideologies in Antiquity regarding the negative value of the labor practice. Thus, they explore literary and material evidences to understand the ways in which the workers and their work world was organized.

In A guide to scenes of daily life on Athenian vases (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2020, 272 pages, paperback, US$34.95), John Oakley provides an extensive catalog of scenes of everyday life on Athenian vases dated between 630-320 BCE. These scenes were extracted from a variety of ceramic supports, from transportation jars (pithoi) to perfume bottles (lekythoi), fabricated through the three great Attic technical traditions (black-figure, red-figure, and white-ground). The sources are divided in ten thematic chapters, of which it is worth mentioning those that are concerned with the home and work spaces, city and countryside surroundings. This catalogue allows the visualization of forms and shapes of representation of the practices of subaltern groups and gives tools to question their degrees of representativeness and the conditions of production, consumption and use of these figurative objects.

In Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2021, 277 p., £18.99), Sara Forsdyke questions what it was like to be a slave in Classical Greece (500-300 BC). Starting from the definition of slavery in Greek thought, Forsdyke then investigates the trajectory of the enslaved from the processes of enslavement, the jobs they performed, and the ethnicities related to specific jobs to their mechanisms of escape and flight, as well as their influence on Greek culture. The investigation is carried out through literary, epigraphic, material, legal and discursive sources, as well as an approach against the grain of documents produced by slave masters. The author argues that we need to understand Greek slavery as a plural and central experience in Greek society so as not to reproduce an incomplete and mystifying image of Ancient Greece itself.

In L’esclave dans l´Égypte romaine : choix de documents traduits et commentés (Liège: Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2020, 150 pages, 14 €), Jean Straus presents a selection of sources on slavery in Roman Egypt translated into French by himself and other scholars. Among the 157 sources presented, most are papyrus and ostraka, but literary and epigraphic texts are also included. The volume also offers tools to assist in the consultation and transcription of documents in their original languages, such as the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri, maps of Egypt and of the region of Fayyum, glossary of events, useful terms for understanding the texts, etc. The documents are organized by themes, covering everything from slavery as an institution to the actions, feelings, conflicts and interactions between the enslaved and between enslaved and freeborn people.

In Mulheres nos Cristianismos Paulinos (Rio de Janeiro: Kliné, 2021. R$30,00), Juliana B. Cavalcanti explores the ways in which women participated in the early Christians movements. Her study opposes what the author sees as a multisecular process of silencing women’s actuation in the early Christian communities. Starting from a documentary critique of the Pauline corpus, accompanied by analysis of vocabulary, comparisons with inscriptions and an iconographic inquire, Cavalcanti carries out case studies about the forms in which women were integrated in the dissemination and consolidation of religious knowledge and practices of these early Christianities. Characters such as common women, rich widows and religious leaders like Thecla are present in a narrative that combines history and archaeology.

The People of the Cobra Province in Egypt: A Local History, 4500 to 1500 BC (Oxford, Oxbow Books, 2020, 288 pages, Hardcover, 55 euros), by Wolfram Grajetzki, is a pioneering book in Egyptology for proposing the study from the history of ancient Egypt, between 4500 and 1500 BC, from below. Taking a Marxist approach to writing history, Grajetzki conducts a microhistorical study of the Wadjet province (Cobra), exploring archaeological evidence from the Qau cemetery, as well as local and regional written sources. His aim is to investigate how the working classes of small villages Egyptians lived and were affected by the decisions of the rulers. Last but not least, the author innovates by reflecting on how the contemporary political context and the social origins of Egyptologists have marked the prevailing views in the discipline about the Egyptian past.

Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019, 295 pages, hardcover: US$ 31; pdf in open access here), by Ally Kateusz, addresses how studies of Mary, mother of Jesus, tend to place her as a secondary figure and model of female obedience, despite ample evidence in iconography and in apocryphal texts indicating the opposite. Through the analysis of these sources, the author argues how it is possible to identify the protagonism of women, especially Mary, in the first Christian communities, and how their silencing occurred due to the internal conflicts of the church over gender roles and the prejudice of scribes in describing scenes of female protagonism, whether baptizing, preaching or prophesying. Through iconography, the author questions the rise of the Marian cult, placing it prior to canonical dating, and emphasizing Mary as an authority figure and that erasing her as such is political.

Rome’s Sicilian Wars: The Revolts of Eunus and Salvius, 136-132 and 105-100 BC (Pen & Sword Military, 2020, 256 pages, $49,55) is a study by Natale Barca of two slave revolts that took place in Sicily during the late Roman Republic. The first revolt was led by Eunus, a former slave and prophet, and the second by Salvius, a flutist. The revolts were attended by slaves and free people, who proclaimed Eunus and Salvius kings and were brutally repressed by the Roman authorities. Barca discusses the facts of the revolts through the contrast and criticism of the literary documentation, written by Roman elites hostile to them, reconstructs the political and social context of Sicily in the period, and argues that the participants contested the Roman control over the region, what differentiates these revolts from later ones, such as Spartacus’.

In Freed Slaves and Roman Imperial Culture: Social Integration and the Transformation of Values (Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press, 2018, 216 pages, hardcover, $108), Rose MacLean analyzes the strategies employed by freedmen to move socially and how elites react and adapt to these strategies. Using literary and epigraphic sources, the author seeks to contrast the elitist bias of literary sources with those produced by the freedmen themselves. The author also discusses how freedmen cannot be seen in isolation, but in daily interaction with slaves and free people. Finally, the author also analyzes, from the point of view of the freedmen themselves, the practical effects of manumission, such as ruptures, continuities, the impacts on their descendants, and the language chosen by them to talk about themselves.

In The Bearers of Business Letters in Roman Egypt (Peeters, 2022, 64 p., available at: https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:159492), Paul Shubert investigates letter bearers in Roman Egypt from the 1st to the 3rd century, rescuing some experiences of the common people that made communication over long distances possible in the period. The study is developed from about 2,000 business letters selected by the author, among more than 60.000 letters, because they explicitly or implicitly identify their bearers. Then, in addition to the formal structure of communication, Shubert investigates the carriers' experiences in the transport of letters itself, as well as in other activities and services that they could perform together, such as carriers of different items and money, information, among others.

In At Home in Roman Egypt: a Social Archeology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021, 350 pages, hardcover, US$89.83, 2021), Anna Lucille Boozer discusses, through social theory and extensive papyrological and archaeological documentation, the everyday lives of “common people”, especially women and children. Addressing topics such as plays, education, relationships (marriage, divorce, contraceptive methods and abortions), body care, domestic religion, illness and death, the author offers a view of everyday life in Roman Egypt, highlighting transformations and continuities, for example, in mortuary and reproductive practices before, during and after the rise of Christianity. Thus, the author aims to demonstrate how these people are active agents in history and contribute to broader cultural changes.

In La svolta dei Gracchi tra prassi politica e violenza nei reflessione storiografica (Sevilla: Prensa de la Universidade de Zaragoza, 2022, 230 pages, €21.15) Chantal Gabrielli emphasizes that the murder of the Gracchus brothers was interpreted as the cause of the decline of the Roman Republic in the reflections of ancient and modern historians. Starting from this assumption, her objective is to investigate this reflection from different perspectives, focusing, above all, on its legal-institutional aspects. Despite this focus, it is worth noting the importance of the event for discussions about popular mobilization in the period, for example. Regarding this, the author contrasts some normative discourses that she investigates with literary and epigraphic records of popular voices, which sometimes suggest different perceptions about the event.

In The Struggle Over Class: Socioeconomic Analysis of Ancient Christian Texts (Atlanta: The Society of Biblical Literature, 2021, 472 pages, paperback US$ 61.04), a collection of studies organized by G. Keddie, M. Flexsenhar e S. Friesen, researches on the New Testament e Early Christians seek to critically analyze the socio economic categories used to understand early Christian texts. They test, especially, the different conceptions of “class” (Marxist, Weberian, etc), as well as its relation with other forms of social differentiation (etnic, gender, religion, etc), to comprehend five categories of sources: the epistoles, the Synoptic tradition, John and the Acts, apocalyptical texts and the patristic literature. Using these sources, they investigate how constructions of class identity, divergences and conflicts of that time can be learned from the concepts discussed. The authors also approach themes as the domestic life, slavery, marriage, mortuary practices, work assossiations and religious afiliations.

Slavery in the Late Antique World, 150-700 CE (Cambridge University Press, 2022, Hardcover, 359 pages, $120), edited by Chris L. de Wet, Maijastina Kahlos, and Ville Vuolanto, is a collection of studies on the slavery and the living conditions of enslaved people in Late Antiquity in their cultural and geographical variations. The book is the result of the effort of a team made up of members from the United States, South Africa, Europe and Latin America. The authors put into perspective those enslaved in the peripheral regions of the Roman Empire and present comparative historical approaches, sources written in Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, Latin and Greek, and a diversity of inscriptions and papyri. They also discuss the relationship between slavery and social discourses, gender, age group and ethnicity, among other topics. This diversity of themes, approaches and sources makes the work a great introduction to the most recent research on the subject in this specific historical period.

In Illiterate Geography in Classical Athens and Rome (Routledge, 2020, 278 p., hard cover: $128,00 [eBook $39,16]), Daniela Dueck investigates the circulation of geographical knowledge by aural and visual means among the illiterate groups of Athens and Rome in their expansion periods (508-338 BC and 264 BC-14 AD). The documents investigated by the author are oral communications preserved in writing, public and non-textual performances, as well as visual materials, which allow her to access geographic information transmitted beyond the small circles of the literate elites. The book thus demonstrates that much geographic information circulated among the populations of Athens and Rome, stimulating new investigations into the construction and transmission of this knowledge among subaltern groups in the Ancient Mediterranean.

In Athens at the margins: pottery and people in the early Mediterranean world (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2021, 344 pages, $45.00), Nathan Arrington studies the emergence and spread of the Protoatic style in Greek pottery in Athens in the 7th century BCE. His approach starts from the refusal of the “orientalizing” explanatory paradigm and the focus on elite consumption practices. Arrington focuses on the interactions established on the margins and by the marginalized: both geographically (in the contacts between Athens, the Attica and the Mediterranean) and socially (in the relations of production and consumption of objects). To do this, he investigates the material contexts of workshops, necropolises, sanctuaries and symposia. It is worth mentioning his focus on the cooperation between artisans as an explanation for the great stylistic variability of Protoatic ceramics. However, it is worth to pursue his investigation to verify to what extent the experimentation and diversity of objects would be connected with his claims of a lack of cultural hegemony and of an almost sociocultural indistinction between elites and other social actors.

In Manual of Roman Everyday Writing Vol. 2 Writing Equipment (LatinNow ePubs, 2021, e-book, available here), Anna Willi introduces the reader to the writing instruments utilized for the production of handwritten texts in the Roman Empire. The catalog of discussed instruments includes writing utensils (stylus, ink pen, brush) and supports (wood, papyrus, parchment, metals, among others), and many others accessories (such as inks, pen cases, spatula, etc). The catalog is preceded by an introduction of the social aspects of writing and of the writing techniques in the Roman Empire. The author points out the social prestige associated with writing in Roman society, but she also demonstrates how the writing was utilized in a functional way in commercial areas, production centers and military camps by people without a formal education, and not only by men, but also women.

In Manual of Roman Everyday Writing Vol. 1 Scripts and Texts (LatinNow ePubs, 2021, e-book, available for free download here), Alan Bowman and Alex Mullen present a manual for reading and understanding documents written in Roman cursive, that is, everyday writing. The authors describe the types of documents that use this writing, the main publications with these documents accompanied by links to access. The book also offers practical examples of learning and the uses of writing in different parts of the Roman Empire, demonstrating how people from different social classes learned and used Latin in different ways, whether in ceramic producing centers, in military camps or in the provincial administration.