January - 2026

In Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (Princeton University Press, 2025, 512 pages, US$ 39.95), Kim Bowes investigates the everyday economic experiences of those who depend on their own labor for a living during the Roman Empire, between the late 1st century BCE and the first half of the 3rd century CE. Drawing on material, literary, and papyrological sources, as well as graffiti and inscriptions, she explores the economic practices and strategies of survival shared by various socio-identity groups, highlighting the common ground of hustling and means of securing sustenance shared by men, women, and children, whether free or enslaved. By scrutinizing how this large and diverse group of people farmed, produced, earned, saved, spent, borrowed and sometimes lent, Bowes redirects the historiographical debate on the Roman economy, moving from productive performance and its traditional categories of analysis toward lived economic experiences.

In La condition servile dans la Rome antique: de la déshumanisation à une certaine humanisation (Editions L'Harmattan, 2024, 200 pages, €23), edited by Jean-Baptiste Nsuka Nkoko and Chantal Nsongisa Kimesa, the status and experience of enslaved people in Rome are analyzed through legal texts and other textual sources. The book examines how the Roman slave system treated slaves as property without rights, subject to the arbitrary will of their owners, including violence. At the same time, it points to nuances of "humanization": some slaves could acquire skills, occupy positions of responsibility, and, in certain cases, become freed. The work also traces the historical evolution of the servile condition, from the Republic to the Empire, highlighting the legal and social transformations that gradually recognized aspects of the human dignity of these individuals. Finally, the authors also seek to reflect on the historical weight and resonances of slavery in the contemporary world.