At the end of September, The Megaphone sat down with Dr. Jeffery Easton, Assistant Professor of Classics to discuss his recent research in Ancient Roman epigraphy (writing in durable materials like stone) and the archaeological work that goes into uncovering the largely-untold daily lives of average Romans.

Part of Dr. Easton’s interest as a professor of Classics is to glimpse into the lives of “sub-elite” Romans. He defines the sub-elite Romans as lower-class, marginalized communities who make up the 98% of Roman population. Their stories aren’t often told compared to the myths and aristocratic writing that defines what most people think of when they imagine Roman culture.

To understand what the lives of these everyday Romans looked like, Dr. Easton built off a long history of scholarship in his field, although he noted that studying the “average” Romans was a fairly new interest in Classics. Dr. Easton also sourced much of his work from in-person archaeological work while pulling from a vast database of Roman tombstones, many of which had yet to be studied.

Dr. Easton shared: “In some of my previous research, I looked at a group of enslaved Romans who became freed, and I tried to track their social mobility. Families who began in slavery, and their free-born descendants.” Continuing, he mentioned, “where I come in with my research — there’s been a lot of [research] on how social mobility is supposed to work. […] Very few studies had really challenged that model.”

In that research, Dr. Easton looked at ‘municipal freedmen’, a specific group of Roman slaves owned in towns instead of cities, challenging the preconceptions about what their lives were like. He found that although an assumption exists that freed slaves were supposed to have quick upward mobility in Roman society, the reality for many fell short of that ideal.

With his expert eye for analysis, Dr. Easton discussed how Roman tombstones could tell you about a person’s family, their wealth, or the social expectations about what kind of lives they led. However, the story of an average person is hard to tell from just their tombstone. Dr. Easton’s research also included analyzing work by Ancient Roman playwrights like Petronius and Apuleius, reconstructing insulae, or Roman apartment complexes. In addition, Easton draws from work in other disciplines and methods, including the study of slavery in the American South, sociological approaches to the field, and even uncovering ancient graffiti written on the walls of cities like Pompeii.

But the most exciting thing we discussed was the hands-on research Dr. Easton led over the summer. Four students were able to travel with Dr. Easton to Rome for SURF, or the Southwestern Undergraduate Research with Faculty program. There, they hopped from site to site, visiting the storerooms of museums and archaeological sites like the ancient city of Ostia. Along the way, they were even able to walk the roads of a preserved Necropolis, or ‘city of the dead’, where ancient mausoleums and paintings dotted the final resting place for wealthy Romans.

To organize all this data, Dr. Easton used a relatively new methodology to the field, called “critical fabulation”. The method was pioneered by Saidiya Hartman, a professor of literature at Colombia studying cultural history, slavery, and several other disciplines. Hartman defined critical fabulation in her 2008 article “Venus in Two Acts” as “a means of telling ‘an impossible story’ and revealing the mechanisms that impede its telling”. By looking at groups that are marginalized in the historical record, scholars can build a glimpse of a person’s life and how they were treated by society at large by highlighting the ways existing evidence may skip over or omit details about them.

Dr. Easton discussed how using this method can be challenging, adding that for him it really required “[being] an expert in the field you’re talking about” and “understanding Roman society more broadly”. Dr. Easton studied Roman legal sources, Roman economy, and other facets of Roman society to do some creative storytelling about how that society may have treated people on its lowest levels. He states, “It helps to flesh out what the experience might have been. If you’re trying to tell the general public about the concept of Roman slavery, you could bore them with technical details, but something like critical fabulation is a lot more engaging.”

Dr. Easton elaborated, “This is more important than ever in today’s political climate where there are people who are trying to whitewash the history of slavery.” With efforts to erase the trauma and impact of histories like slavery, “Whatever your field is, it’s important to get these things out there and set the record straight. It’s more than just dry facts — the best historians are great storytellers.”

Dr. Easton’s work has been reviewed by leading figures in the Classics field and cited several times. He was eager in the hope that this research would help encourage more focused study of specific groups moving through Roman society. “If we get enough of these little pieces, we can paint the bigger picture.”  

Dr. Easton is also using some of the stories of forgotten Romans that he uncovered to write his own introductory Latin textbook. One of the stars of his upcoming story-based textbook is Tiberius Claudius Auticus, whose tomb was a great mausoleum in the “isola sacra” necropolis Dr. Easton and his students visited over the summer. By stepping into Tiberius’ tomb, you can see carvings and spaces for all the members of his family and his business clients, as well as Tiberius’ businesses like bakeries and port tugboats. In front of his tomb, an inscription tells the story of Tiberius’ life, his history as a slave, and how he came into the privileged role he had when he died.

“I found it really interesting,” he said in reflection on his summer research experience. “It’s always fun when you can really flesh out the picture like that. All of these people were real people, they had lives, even if you go to a cemetery today, it’s hard to get the full narrative unless you dig a little deeper.” Though despite the turn of phrase, Dr. Easton added with a laugh that he hoped nobody took it too literally. 

The students who participated in this research, led by Dr. Easton, will be publishing their findings in writing and on a website through Southwestern, as well as presenting them at the Research and Creative Works Symposium next semester.