The Nature of the Sources. The question "What was daily life like in Roman antiquity?" is in some respects easy to respond to, yet, in other ways difficult to answer. It is easy to point to the sources at our disposal; works of art, ruins of buildings, and passages of literature. The difficulty lies in distinguishing between the experiences of those for whom the sources reveal the most, and the experiences of those for whom the sources reveal the least. The majority of people living in the Roman world must have been members of the latter category. Therefore, we can describe the lives of only a fraction of Rome's population with a great degree of detail and accuracy. That fraction consisted of the economic, social, and political elite—for whom works of art were produced and luxury homes were built, and by whom much literature was written...