When people think of the ancient world, they will likely think of the vast monuments that still stand today, like the Colosseum in Rome and the pyramids of Egypt, that are attributed to the great men that fill most of our surviving literary sources. However, these monuments were only possible thanks to the work of ordinary people.
Ordinary people, both free and enslaved, worked to build the Colosseum, the pyramids, the Roman aqueducts that still crisscross the lands that composed the Roman Empire. They quarried and shaped the stones, hauled them to the building sites, and raised them. Yet, unfortunately, despite their important contributions, ordinary people are often overlooked in ancient history, barely discernible — besides a few notable examples — in the surviving sources, both literary and archaeological.
In…
