Free Invisible Romans by Robert C. Knapp Page A

saw-sharpening service at work, and to top it all off, a pipe and flute seller who can’t sing, so he just shouts everything out. (Letters 56.1, 2)
    Trying to put this reality out of our heads, I return to the main point: the baths were social gathering places for ordinary men and, indeed, for their families as well. Children could and did frequent at least some baths with their parents. An epitaph from Rome tells a sad story:
    Daphnus and Chryseis, freedpersons of Laco, set this gravestone up to their dear Fortunatus. He lived 8 years. He perished in the pool at the Baths of Mars. ( CIL 6.16740)
    And it is probably echoed in another, made, sadly, by the stone carver himself:
    I, most unlucky father, carved this for my boy who, poor soul, perished in the pool. He lived 3 years and 6 months. ( CIL 9.6318, Chieti, Italy)
    Although this was not the norm by any means, women even sometimes bathed with the men. Pompeius Catussa set up a touching epitaph:
    To the Gods of the Underworld and the everlasting memory of Blandinia Martiola, a most pure girl who lived 18 years, 9 months, and 5 days. Pompeius Catussa, a Sequanian citizen, a plasterer, set this monument up to an incomparable wife, most kind to me, who lived with me 5 years, 6 months and 18 days without any base reproach, and to himself while still alive. You who read this, go to the Baths of Apollo to bathe, a thing which I did with my wife. How I wish I could do it still! ( CIL 13.1983 = ILS 8158, Lyon, France)
    Leaving home or an association meeting or the baths, the ordinary man went out into the street expecting to enter a busy, noisy world. Much of his life was spent outside, as was the life of everyone else in society. He found what he needed, especially food, in the stalls or spread out on mats which were set up not only in the few open spaces, but along any street; these complemented the relatively few actual shops where goods were sold. Weaving in and out of the crowds, beggars accosted him, street musicians played or sang for handouts, teachers tried to keep the attention of their pupils amid the loud hum, street philosophers, soothsayers, magicians, and assorted accosters plied their trade.
    And we often see how even in the midst of a very great turmoil and throng the individual is not hampered in carrying on his own occupation; but, on the contrary, the man who is playing the flute or teaching a pupil to play it devotes himself to that, often holding school in the very street, and the crowd does not distract him at all, or the din made by the passers-by; and the dancer likewise, or dancing master, is engrossed in his work, being utterly heedless of those who are fighting and selling and doing other things; and so also with the harper and the painter. But here is the most extreme case of all: The elementary teachers sit in the streets with their pupils and nothing hinders them in this great throng from teaching and learning. And I remember once seeing, while walking through the Hippodrome, many people on one spot and each doing something different: one playing the flute, another dancing, another doing a juggler’s trick, another reading a poem aloud, another singing, and another telling some story or myth; and yet not a single one of them prevented anyone else from attending to his own business and doing the work that he had in hand. (Dio Chrysostom, Discourses 20.9–10/Cohoon)
    The society of the street was crucial. Even if one had a business, and certainly if, as was very widely the case, a person was underemployed and had lots of time on his hands on a regular basis, visits to the local tavern were a daily affair. One vignette must suffice. Wall paintings from the Tavern of the Seven Sages in Ostia illustrate the humor of the men in such places. The tavern was an unexceptional ‘local’; there were no pretensions to architectural or other grandeur. The Seven Sages werefavorites of the elite; they were often illustrated with busts, quotations, and so on in