By Fábio Duarte Joly, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto. The Covid-19 pandemic, in addition to being a serious health crisis that the world is currently experiencing, brought to light social inequalities that were already present, but which have now become more explicit. For example, in Brazil, as elsewhere, the term "invisible" has been applied to the informal workers – those without any record in official government data and who, therefore, would be as if they "did not exi

By Renata Senna Garraffoni, Universidade Federal do Paraná. If I started this text by asking: were there children among the ancient Romans? Certainly, readers would answer that there were. But if I changed the question a little bit: what do you know about Roman children? Probably nothing or very little, am I right? So, how do you explain this? The point is that questions about the past are highly dependent on the interests of the present. For a long time, what capture the int

By Juliana Marques Morais, Doctor in Social History, Universidade de São Paulo. Among the sumptuous buildings that make up the Roman historic centre, the Basilica of Sant’Agnese in Agone, located in Piazza Navona, stands out in the landscape for its magnitude. One of its main attractions is the small sanctuary installed inside, where the skull of St. Agnes is deposited. The young Roman citizen is one (perhaps the best known and celebrated) of the female figures that make up t

By Rafael Monpean, PhD candidate in Social History, University of São Paulo. Every year a few million tourists visit Rome, Ostia, Pompeii, Herculaneum. They appreciate several ancient monuments in each of these cities, such as temples, houses, theatres, amphitheatres, baths, and shops. But, at the end of a day's journey, few give importance to the space through which they walked on these visits. The streets they walked through become something naturalized, when they are not a

By Cristina Rosillo López, Universidad Pablo de Olavide “It was done aloud and with a kind of song to be heard from afar, which caused a scandal, because it was considered that there was a good reason for it”. The “escrache” (a noisy protest against politicians held outside their homes) has become one of the current buzzwords. Its legality or not, the modalities of its organization and expression have become subjects of public debate. Famous in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, e

By Fábio Joly, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto. Few moments enable us to glimpse, in such a direct and accentuated way, the political and public impact of slavery in the city of Rome as in the description, by the senator and historian Cornelius Tacitus (56-117 CE), of an episode that occurred at the time of Emperor Nero. In 61 CE, Pedanius Secundus, prefect of the city of Rome, was killed at home by one of his slaves (Ann. 14.42-45). There was then a lively debate in the S

By Cyril Courrier (Aix-Marseille Université) and Jean-Pierre Guilhembet (Université Paris-Diderot-Université de Paris). The image of the city of Rome in ancient sources is ambiguous. Augustus boasted about having turned it into a model of urbanity, but other descriptions remain very negative: a city where poverty reigned, and a population of miserable marginalized and poor people lived. For Horace, Rome seemed to be entirely made up of brothels and bars. According to Catullus

By Renata Senna Garraffoni, Universidade Federal do Paraná. Have you ever stopped to think that whenever people talk about the Roman Empire, people imagine soldiers and wars? Well, this is not for nothing. Modern historiography, developed from the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th, a time of European territorial expansion, favored the study of the world of wars, politics and economics, places that women, in the view of these men, would rarely be present at. A

By Giovan do Nascimento, PhD candidate, University of São Paulo. Nicknames can be seen as means of political participation of the popular classes? The answer relies on how we view the politics.If we focus on its institutional aspects, perhaps the nicknames says little about this participation. But if we expand into the informal aspects of politics, we will see nicknames as fragments of public opinion that directly or indirectly influence the reputation of prominent persons. A

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira, Universidade de São Paulo. The popular classes seldom played a role in modern depictions of Ancient Rome in movies and TV series. In this sense, HBO's Rome series, produced between 2004 and 2007, marked an important change. While the universe of the great personalities of the end of the Republic is still represented according to a well-known tradition in cinema, the world of the popular classes, of Vorenus and Pullo, the main characters, is